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Rebels on the Border offers a remarkably compelling and significant study of the Civil War South's highly contested and bloodiest border states: Kentucky and Missouri. By far the most complex examination to date, the book sharply focuses on the ''borderland'' between the free North and the Confederate South. As a result, Rebels on the Border deepens and enhances our understanding of the sectional conflict, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

After slaves in central Kentucky and Missouri gained their emancipation, author Aaron Astor contends, they transformed informal kin and social networks of resistance against slavery into more formalized processes of electoral participation and institution building. At the same time, white politics in Kentucky's Bluegrass and Missouri's Little Dixie underwent an electoral realignment in response to the racial and social revolution caused by the war and its aftermath. Black citizenship and voting rights provoked a violent white reaction and a cultural reinterpretation of white regional identity. After the war, the majority of wartime Unionists in the Bluegrass and Little Dixie joined former Confederate guerrillas in the Democratic Party in an effort to stifle the political ambitions of former slaves.

Rebels on the Border is not simply a story of bitter political struggles, partisan guerrilla warfare, and racial violence. Like no other scholarly account of Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War, it places these two crucial heartland states within the broad context of local, southern, and national politics.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Astor consulted an impressive array of manuscript collections, government documents, newspapers and secondary sources to fashion this fascinating study of the transformation of the political and social order in these two border states. Anyone with an interest in either of these critical states during the antebellum, wartime or postwar periods will need to consult this fine work. Highly recommended." -- Jeff Patrick, Interpretive Specialist at Wilson's Creek National Battlefield

"A fascinating and sobering view of shifting memories during Reconstruction, Astor's study goes a long way to complicate and drive forward the entire field of border state studies. Overall, Astor maintains a keen analytical focus on a slippery subject and in doing so provides us with an engaging and meaningful take on Kentucky and Missouri during the Civil War era."-- Court Carney, H-Civil War, Author of Cuttin' Up: How Early Jazz Got America's Ear

''Aaron Astor compellingly and definitively explains the political culture surrounding the Border South's belated embrace of the Confederacy and its consequences for the region's citizens, both white and African American. This volume stands to redefine Civil War and Border State studies.'' --Anne E. Marshall, author of Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State

''In this clearly and forcefully written study, employing meticulous research skills, Aaron Astor reconstructs an utterly realistic panorama of the era of the Civil War in the border states of Kentucky and Missouri. Far from a romantic portrait of racial progress, what emerges is a sobering account of the sustaining force of a white supremacist nation whose long-term effects still corrode American society.'' --Michael Fellman, author of Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This excellent comparative history examines how and why two of the South's most important Border Slave States--Missouri and Kentucky--remained in the Union and, in the case of Kentucky, why numerous Bluegrass slaveholders opposed secession in order to safeguard the state's peculiar institution. Presenting his argument in cogent fashion, the author, Aaron Astor, shows both his mastery of the secondary literature on antebellum, wartime, and post-bellum Kentucky as well as his knowledge of archival evidence and period newspapers. Even with a spate of new books on Civil War era Kentucky, one learns much that is new from Rebels on the Border. To cite but one example, the explanation Astor provides of the strength of Kentucky's conservative unionists in 1861, better enables readers to appreciate why, in a bid to protect slavery, so many of the state's slaveholders opposed the methods of Cotton South secessionists.

The study, which uses impressive statistical evidence that Astor gleaned from select, but densely enslaved Missouri and Kentucky counties, contains insightful observations about slave patrols and informs readers as to why initially formidable unionism in the respective states(with very different political bases)ultimately collapsed, giving way to efforts to reestablish what the author terms "white man's democracy" in the face of the challenge of "Black Suffrage and the New Political Order." Finally, Astor provides his readers and students with a tidy, yet authoritative conclusion.

By revealing the polarities within each section before the war and the making of common cause between the majority Unionists and the Confederates after the war, Astor's book "complicates the notion of sectionalism itself." Ironically, the opposing sides in those two regions fought for the same reason, to preserve slavery; for the same cause they worked together in post-war years to bring down blacks who had risen during radical northern dominance and to keep them down. That story "foreshadows the historical narrative of the rest of the nation in the later nineteenth century."

I shuddered to learn early in the book that about two hundred men and women gathered on Christmas Eve 1866 on the grounds of the First Presbyterian Church in former Unionist Danville, Kentucky to hang Al McRoberts, a black man. On that spot, the Daughters of the Confederacy erected a memorial to Confederate soldiers. One may visit it on the edge of the campus of Centre College, where I taught English in 1960 and '61.

One of Astor's most well-documented and revealing arguments is that "in a microcosm of national events the slave population would prove to be the real engine of political transformation during the Civil War and Reconstruction era."

Astor expresses his theories with cogent clarity, and his mastery of research provides narrative details that renders this book uncommonly readable, and, perhaps, revolutionary.

I would like to recommend this book as a corrective to simplistic conceptions of the American Civil War as a struggle between the North of budding industry and independent farmers opposed to a slaveholding South of great plantations and oppressed white poor. I would like to recommend a book that is the product of so much detailed and often correctly aimed research. I would like to recommend a book that gets so much right. I would like to recommend a book that shines a spotlight on a geographic area that I have studied intensely. But in the final analysis, I must demur.Aaron Astor compares the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky with Missouri's Little Dixie. Kentucky and Missouri, in common with the other border states of Maryland and Delaware were slaveholding states that stayed within the Union. Astor believes that so many slaveholders in both Kentucky and Missouri opposed secession in 1861 because they believed slavery as an institution would be, in the end, better protected within the Union than within an embattled Confederacy. Over the course of the war and reconstruction, these conservative Unionists were gradually pushed toward the Southern position as the war changed from a war to protect the Union and preserve slavery within its mid-19th century boundaries and became a war to abolish slavery and give former slaves full legal and political equality.I do not have the expertise required to evaluate what the author says about Kentucky, although most of what is said sounds plausible. But much of what Astor says about Missouri contains dubious assumptions, over-interpretation of a few incidents, or even misinterpretation.The first question is the relative size of Missouri's conservative Unionist block.Read more ›